Kate Stalter taught stock picking for Investor’s Business Daily, Money Shows, Forbes, TheStreet.com and Tiger Financial News Network for more than a decade. Today, as an adviser with Albuquerque-based Portfolio, she uses balanced portfolios to achieve long-term returns for clients. She maintains that active investors (and traders) cannot consistently beat the market over long periods of time, except by chance. Yet individuals and professionals challenge this truism every day through their efforts to pick stocks and time markets. The evidence shows that their efforts are not worth the high cost.